Grandeur and Frenchness: Nationalism, International Relations and French National Character

Abstract

It is well known that, on the French side, a perception of English perfidy has been persistent and all but unanimous. Not that this was a French peculiarity. Nor was it a recent phenomenon. At least as early as the twelfth century German authors were complaining about perfidia anglica. And, in the thirteenth century, Spanish texts blamed the English of treachery, adding that they ‘have false hearts’. As Eugen Weber has remarked, this attribution of treachery to the English ‘would in time become commonplace’.2 Increased contact and familiarity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries only confirmed the image and gave it concrete ‘evidence’. As one would expect, the successive wars of the eighteenth century and then the wars of the French Revolution and the Empire did not make things better. ‘Perfidious Albion’ had a selfish foreign policy, wanted to divide and rule, was obsessed with acquiring new markets, and certainly could not be trusted. According to H.D. Schmidt, from the beginning of 1794 onwards, there was a deliberate and systematic government policy of raising French sentiments of hostility towards England, initiated by Robespierre and continued by his successors of the Directory, who launched ‘a campaign of hatred on a nation-wide scale’. This policy was continued and perfected by Napoleon.KeywordsForeign PolicyForeign AffairFrench RevolutionForeign MinisterFrench PeopleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.